| Abstract [eng] |
As the importance of information technologies is growing in all fields of social life, political communication is rapidly moving to the cyberspace. The subject of the Master‘s Degree Thesis is political communication in personal politician‘s websites and social networking sites. The aim of the paper is to examine the use of information technologies, namely political websites and social networks, for the political communication in Lithuania by testing two hypothesis: 1) Lithuanian politicians do not exploit the full potential of internet multimedia, interactivity and information update possibilities; 2) Social networks in Lithuania are used for personal and casual rather than political ends seeking communication. The main tasks of the Thesis are as following: to define the concept of political communication and it’s models; to analyze the impact of information technologies on political communication and the way it is conducted; to perform quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the Seimas member’s websites and social profiles; to conduct the survey of Lithuanian parliament members about their communication on Facebook; to analyse the results and evaluate the use of political websites and Facebook for political communication in Lithuania. The analyses revealed that the majority of political websites do not move away from “electronic brochure” model, as the interactivity and information update possibilities are often neglected. The first hypothesis of the Thesis was partly confirmed as multimedia features appeared on the majority of the political websites. Moreover, it was discovered that the politician’s profiles on Facebook are used mainly for personal and casual rather than political ends seeking communication that led to the confirmation of the second hypothesis. This led to conclusion that members of the Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania do not use the full capacities of information technologies to reach the voters directly through the different tools of the internet. To make political communication more effective in the means of using new technologies, it is suggested not to avoid interactivity and discussions in political websites, also to exploit the possibilities of social networking in generating and discussing political ideas. |
